If one researcher had prioritised money over her research, we might not have had a Covid-19 vaccine.
In 1995, after years of struggle, Hungarian-born Katalin Karikó ran out of funding to continue her work that would fundamentally change the way we treat diseases.
No one was willing to fund her research.
David Cox writes, “More often than not, Karikó found herself hitting dead ends. Numerous grant applications were rejected, and an attempt to raise funding from venture capitalists in New York to form a spin-off company had proved to be a fruitless endeavour. ‘They initially promised to give us money, but then they never returned my phone calls,’ she says.”
Karikó was on her way to a full professorship at the University of Pennsylvania but when her research couldn’t attract more funding the university offered her a bleak choice: stop her research or get demoted.
Thankfully (for us), she decided to take the pay cut.
Eventually Karikó, together with immunologist Drew Weissman, would go on to license their research on the application of artificial mRNA.
This eventually lead to a vaccine that’s 95% effective at preventing COVID-19.
The ideas that are the most disruptive make for risky investments.
Whether it’s public or privately funded, commercial success is essential for sustainably fuelling innovation.
But that can’t be the only reason.
Greg Satell explains how innovation and disruption have become “solipsistic and self-referential, pursued for the glory of the innovators themselves rather than for the benefit of everyone else.”
Here’s the rub: as a species, we can be painfully short-sighted.
We’re hardwired to choose short-term wins over long-term gains. And nowhere else is this more visible than our relationship with technology.
Our initial reaction to transformative technologies goes to the extreme ends from euphoria to fear.
And living on these extremes we fail to see the bigger picture. Despite the fact that, in the long run, new technologies create far more jobs than they eliminate. As Prof. Galloway writes,
“A technology is introduced — say, the car — and an existing sector is made irrelevant overnight (e.g., horse and carriage). In the short term, we’re fixated on how many horses will be out of a job. Harder to imagine, however, is how many jobs the car will create — as well as the different kinds of jobs it will create. It’s hard to envision radios, turn-signal lights, motion sensors, and heated seats. Let alone NASCAR, The Italian Job, and the drive-through window. In other words, disruptive technology results in demand for things we never knew we wanted.”
Speaking of things we never wanted, new technologies also create new problems that most of us remain oblivious to.
Take ChatGPT for example.
Like the mechanical Turk did in its day, Large Language Models (LLMs) have us marveling at their apparent capabilities.
Whether it’s Medium or LinkedIn, you’ll have no trouble finding people celebrating the ingenuity of the latest generative tool they’ve recently discovered.
But only a few would stop to think about what it takes to bring this seemingly magical technology to their phones and laptops.
John P. Nelson explains, “So if ChatGPT gives you a good or useful answer about something, remember to thank the thousands or millions of hidden people who wrote the words it crunched and who taught it what were good and bad answers.”
And let’s not forget the psychological harm these human AI trainers and social content moderators face so we can get horror-free feeds.
There are other ways in which technologies can be exploitative.
Take the movie review website Rotten Tomatoes, for example.
In her article, “The Decomposition of Rotten Tomatoes”, Lane Brown explains how a website that’s become the global movie guide for audiences around the world brought down the quality of critique by turning it into an average score.
A score that’s frequently gamed.
“For example, in February, the Tomatometer score for Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania debuted at 79 percent based on its first batch of reviews. Days later, after more critics had weighed in, its rating sank into the 40s. But the gambit may have worked.
Quantumania had the best opening weekend of any movie in the Ant-Man series, at $106 million. In its second weekend, with its rottenness more firmly established, the film’s grosses slid 69 percent, the steepest drop-off in Marvel history.”
— Lane Brown, Vulture
Apparently, there’s a whole industry of PR firms that pay bloggers when they write positive reviews, or ‘force’ them to make their otherwise negative reviews sound more positive.
We need big ideas to solve the big problems we face today.
We also need innovations that are commercially successful to create economic growth. Economic growth is essential for funding further innovation.
If we only measure the merit of innovations on their commercial impact, we will continue to lose sight of the long-term social impact.
As Schalk Cloete explains in his article, we “evolved many pleasurable hormonal responses to reinforce behaviours that helped us carve out a living in a world of scarcity”.
For an increasing number of people around the world, life has only become more abundant. From earning money to finding mates, and getting food delivered to our doorstep… there’s an app for everything.
We get the rewards with little effort. That makes us feel confident, so we keep on wanting more.
This “mismatch between our evolved natures and our current environment not only creates serious problems; it also hampers our ability to solve those problems.” (Cloete, Medium)
Technology will keep bringing prosperity. But will it also bring progress?
Big ideas like the internet or generative AI become a rallying cry that gives millions of people a newfound purpose.
In another article, Greg Satell writes:
“. . . [big] ideas were important precisely because they described complex things. Once they rise to the level of a meme, we tend to discard the complex core and focus only on the candy shell. The concept becomes a caricature of itself, repeated so often that few stop to think about its implications and limitations, where it applies and where it does not.”
The most important thing, according to Satell, is to change how we view innovation:
“We need to focus less on disruption and more on creation and, to create for the world we need to focus on what it means to live in it. We can no longer measure progress in terms of how many billionaires a technology creates. We need to focus on making a meaningful impact on people’s lives.”
Technology will continue to bring prosperity. But will it also bring progress?
We need commercial success and social progress.
Both of these ideas need to be true at the same time, most of the time.
“The long-term economic gains we’re bound to realize from transformative technologies (including the car, telephone, internet, and AI) should offset short-term investments in social programs and training that offer a bridge.
The ROI here is not only a function of maintaining a worker’s productivity, but reducing the costs and despair that can sink a household when a family member not only loses their job, but their sense of purpose.
We know technology will continue to bring prosperity. The bigger question is will it bring progress.
— Scott Galloway (Medium)
Innovations and disruptions don’t live inside labs or on the factory floor anymore.
Technology changes human systems.
As this article from the Griffith Centre of Systems Innovation explains, Systems are complex design challenges. And there won’t be any linear or top-down solutions to adapting to these changes.
“Mostly, human and social infrastructure is designed and developed in complex contexts — where there are different perspectives on what is going to be needed, what works, and how the functions should be reflected in governing and spatial forms. Further, because it is now increasingly recognised that we need to grow social infrastructure that is adaptive and capable of testing and learning forward rather than just adopting top-down programmatic and linear pathways of progression, we need to think about how forms and functions interact with context, and how these can change over time.” (Good Shift, Medium)
So, where do we start?
The easiest thing we, as managers and consumers, can do to support better innovation is to ask questions. As Warren Berger writes in A More Beautiful Question, “you don’t learn unless you ask questions”.
We need to teach ourselves to ask questions about the implications and possibilities of big ideas. Because focusing on answers alone closes discussions, but asking questions creates possibilities.
